“Where is it now?”
“Where is what now?”
“Your little finger.”
“I forget,” she said, laughing. “You know, you’re the first person to ever ask that.”
“Does it bother you to be missing your little finger?”
“It does when I’m wearing gloves.”
“Any other times?”
She shook her head. “I’d be lying if I said never. But it’s no worse than girls who worry about fat necks or hairy legs.”
I nodded.
“So what do you do?” she asked.
“I go to college. In Tokyo.”
“Home for vacation.”
“Yeah, you got it.”
“What are you studying?”
“Biology. I love animals.”
“Me too.”
I drained my glass of beer and grabbed a handful of fries.
“Hey…there was a famous leopard in Bhagalpur that killed and ate three hundred and fifty Indians in just three years.”
“Really?”
“An Englishman, Colonel Jim Corbett, who was known as the leopard exterminator, shot one hundred and twenty-five tigers and leopards, including that one, in eight years. So do you still love animals?”
She stubbed out her smoke, took a sip of wine, and studied my face for a moment. “You know,” she said, looking impressed, “you really are a little nuts.”
21
Half a month after my third girlfriend killed herself, I was reading Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière. A great book. Anyway, I came across this passage:
In the work he dedicated to the Cardinal of Lorraine in 1596, the prosecutor M. Remy owns to having burnt eight hundred witches, in sixteen years. “So well do I deal out judgements,” he says, “that last year sixteen slew themselves to avoid passing through my hands.” (tr. Lionel James Trottier, 1863)
For some reason, I find the phrase “So well do I deal out judgements” cool in the extreme.
22
The telephone rang. I was in the midst of applying calamine lotion to my face, which was sunburned from my daily trips to the local pool. After ten rings, I gave up, peeled off the neat checkerboard of cotton squares, and rose from my chair to answer it.
“Hey there. It’s me.”
“Ah, so it’s you.”
“Whatcha doing?”
“Nothing much.”
I patted my stinging face with the towel that was wrapped around my neck.
“I enjoyed myself last night. First time in a long while.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“So…do you like beef stew?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I just made a whole pot. More than I could put away in a week. Want to come over and help me eat it?”
“Sounds good.”
“Okay. Come in an hour. If you’re not here by then, I’ll chuck it all in the garbage. Got it?”
“But…”
“I hate waiting. See ya.”
She hung up before I could open my mouth.
I lay on the sofa for the next ten minutes, staring at the ceiling and listening to the Top 40 on the radio. Then I took a shower, shaved myself smooth and clean under the hot water, and put on a pair of Bermuda shorts, and a shirt just back from the cleaners. It was a pleasant evening. I watched the sun set as I drove along the coastal road, stopping to buy two bottles of chilled white wine and a carton of cigarettes before getting on the highway.
—
She cleared the table and laid out white plates and bowls, while I pried the cork from a bottle of wine with a fruit knife. The room was steaming from the bubbling stew.
“I didn’t know it would get this hot,” she said. “It’s hot as hell.”
“Hell is hotter.”
“Sounds like you’ve been there.”
“I heard it from someone. They make it hotter and hotter till you think you’ll go crazy; then they move you someplace cooler for a while. Then when you’ve recovered a little they move you back again.”
“So hell is like a sauna.”
“Yeah, more or less. But a few can’t recover and go totally bonkers.”
“So what happens to them?”
“They get sent up to heaven, where they’re forced to paint the walls. You see, the walls in heaven have to be kept a perfect white. The slightest smudge is unacceptable. It’s an image thing. As a result, they have to keep painting from dawn till dusk every day. It messes up their respiratory systems big time.”
She stopped asking questions after that. I carefully scooped out the bits of cork that had fallen into the bottle and poured us each a glass.
“To cold wine and warm hearts,” she toasted me.
“Say what?”
“It’s from a TV commercial. Cold wine and warm hearts. You haven’t seen it?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t you watch TV?”
“Once in a while. I used to watch a lot. My favorite was Lassie. The one with the original dog, that is.”
“That’s right, you love animals.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I can watch all day long when I’ve got the time. You name it, I watch it. Yesterday, I saw a debate between a biologist and a chemist. Did you catch that one?”
“No.”
She took a swallow of wine and gave a small shake of her head, as if remembering the moment.
“You know, Pascal had what they call scientific intuition.”
“Scientific intuition?”
“Like, an ordinary scientist thinks: A equals B, B equals C, therefore A equals C. QED. Right?”
I nodded.
“But Pascal’s mind worked in a different way. He just thought, A equals C. He wasn’t interested in proof. But time confirmed his theories, and he came up with all kinds of valuable discoveries.”
“Like vaccines.”
She put her wine down and looked at me, appalled.
“Vaccines? Wasn’t that Jenner? How’d you pass the college entrance exams, anyway?”
“Then, maybe antibodies for rabies, and low-temperature sterilization?”
“Ding-dong.”
She gave a self-satisfied smirk, drained her glass, and refilled it herself.
“In the TV debate, they called that ability ‘scientific intuition.’ Think you might have it?”
“Hardly.”
“Think you’d like some?”
“It might come in handy. Like when I’m in bed with a girl.”
She laughed and headed off to the kitchen, returning with a pot of stew, a bowl of salad, and some rolls. At last a cool breeze reached us through the wide-open windows.
—
We sat back and ate a relaxed dinner while listening to her records. She asked me lots of questions, mostly about my school and my life in Tokyo. Pretty boring stuff. I told her about the cat experiments we carried out. (Of course, I lied that we never killed them. That we were just testing their brain functions. In fact, over the course of a mere two months, I was solely responsible for snuffing out the lives of thirty-six cats of all sizes and shapes.) I told her about the demonstrations and the student strikes. I showed her where a riot cop had knocked out one of my front teeth.
“Don’t you want to get even?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Why not? If it were me, I’d track down that cop and knock out a whole bunch of his teeth with a hammer.”
“Well, I’m me, and as far as I’m concerned it’s over and done with. I wouldn’t know who to go after anyway—all those riot cops look the same.”
“So then there’s no meaning, right?”
“Meaning?”
“No meaning to having your tooth knocked out.”
“Nope.”
She let out a weary groan and took another bite of stew.
—
After dinner, we drank a cup of coffee, washed the dishes side by side in the tiny kitchen, went back to the table, lit a cigarette, and listened to the MJQ on h
er record player.
I could see her nipples clearly through her thin blouse, and her cotton shorts were loose around her hips. To make matters even worse, our legs kept colliding under the table. My face grew redder each time they touched.
“Was dinner good?”
“It was delicious.”
“Then why didn’t you say so sooner?” she said, biting her lower lip.
“It’s a bad habit. I always forget the important stuff.”
“Can I let you in on something?”
“Sure.”
“If you don’t change that habit you’re gonna be the loser.”
“I know. But I’m like an old jalopy. Fix one thing and another breaks down.”
She laughed and put Marvin Gaye on the turntable. The clock said almost eight.
“No shoes to be shined today?”
“I do that before I go to bed. When I brush my teeth.”
She was peering into my eyes as she talked, her slender elbows propped on the table, her chin cupped in her hands. Her gaze was starting to get to me. I tried to escape it by lighting up cigarettes and pretending to look out the window, but that only added to her amusement.
“So I guess I can believe you,” she said.
“Believe what?”
“That you didn’t mess with me the other night.”
“How so?”
“You really want me to tell you?”
“No.”
“I knew you’d say that,” she said, giggling. She filled my glass, then looked out the darkened window, as if considering something. “Sometimes, I imagine how great it would be if we could live our lives without bothering other people. Think it’s possible?”
“I wonder.”
“So tell me, am I bothering you?”
“I’m okay.”
“So far, you mean.”
“Yeah, so far.”
She reached across the table and laid her hand on mine, left it there for a moment, then withdrew it.
“I’m taking a trip tomorrow,” she said.
“A trip to where?”
“Haven’t decided yet. Some place quiet and cool, that’s the plan anyway. For about a week.”
I nodded.
“I’ll call you when I get back.”
*
In the car on my way home, I suddenly remembered my first date. Seven years before.
Now, it feels like I never stopped asking the girl, “Sure you’re not bored?”
We had gone to see an Elvis Presley movie. The lyrics of the theme song went like this:
We had a quarrel, a lovers’ spat,
I write I’m sorry but the letter keeps coming back.
She wrote upon it:
Return to Sender, Address Unknown,
No Such Number, No Such Zone.
Time goes by so damn fast.
23
The third girl I slept with liked to call my penis my “raison d’être.”
*
A while before that, I had tried writing a short story whose theme was the meaning of life. I never finished it, but the process of thinking about people’s raison d’être produced a strange frame of mind, a kind of obsession, in fact, that compelled me to convert everything in my life into numbers. This condition lasted for about eight months, during which I had to count the number of people in the car the moment I boarded a train, the number of steps of each staircase I climbed, even my own pulse if I had the time. According to my records, from August 15, 1969, until April 3rd of the following year, I attended 358 lectures, had sex 54 times, and smoked 6,921 cigarettes.
I believed in all seriousness that by converting my life into numbers I might be able to get through to people. That having something to communicate could stand as proof I really existed. Of course, no one had the slightest interest in how many cigarettes I had smoked, or the number of stairs I had climbed, or the size of my penis. When I realized this, I lost my raison d’être and became utterly alone.
*
And so, when the news of her death reached me, I was smoking my 6,922nd cigarette.
24
The Rat didn’t touch a drop of beer that night. Not a good sign, for sure. Instead he knocked off five Jim Beams on the rocks in quick succession.
We were in the dim innermost corner of J’s Bar, killing time at the pinball machine, that piece of junk that offers dead time in return for small change. The Rat, though, was the kind of guy who took everything seriously. So it was almost a miracle that I beat him in two of the six games we played.
“What’s with you tonight, anyway?”
“Nothing,” the Rat answered.
—
Back we went to the bar for more beer and Jim Beam.
We sat there in sullen silence, listening to one song after another on the jukebox: “Everyday People,” “Woodstock,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “Hey There Lonely Girl.”
“Got a favor to ask,” the Rat said.
“What kind?”
“I want you to meet someone.”
“A girl?”
The Rat hesitated before nodding yes.
“Why ask me?”
“Anyone else around?” the Rat shot back, launching into his sixth Jim Beam. “Oh yeah, do you own a suit and tie?”
“Sure. Still…”
“Then it’s tomorrow at two,” the Rat said. “Hey, what do girls eat to stay alive, anyway?”
“Shoe soles.”
“Get out of here,” the Rat said.
25
The Rat’s favorite food was pancakes, hot off the griddle. He would stack several in a deep dish, cut them into four neat pieces, then pour a bottle of Coke over the top.
The first time I visited the Rat’s home, he had pulled a table out into the balmy May sunlight and was hard at work shoveling this concoction into his mouth.
“This meal’s outstanding feature,” he said, “is the perfect way it blends solid food and drink.”
Wild birds of every shape and hue had gathered in the big wooded yard and were intently pecking at the white popcorn strewn across the lawn.
26
Now I’m going to tell you about the third girl I ever slept with.
It’s hard enough to talk about the dead under normal circumstances, but it’s even harder to talk about girls who have died young: by dying, they stay young forever.
We, on the other hand, advance in age every year, every month, every day. There are times when I can even feel myself aging by the hour. The scary thing is, it’s true.
*
She was no beauty. Yet to say “no beauty” may not be fair. It would be more proper to say, “Her beauty did not reach the level that did her justice.”
I have just one photograph of her. Someone jotted the date on the back—August 1963. The same year Kennedy took a bullet in the head. It seems to have been snapped at a summer resort, and shows her perched on a sea wall smiling a somewhat uncomfortable smile. Her hair is clipped short à la Jean Seberg (a style I somehow connected with Auschwitz then), and she is wearing a long red gingham dress. She looks a bit awkward, and lovely. It is a loveliness that touches the heart.
Her lips are slightly parted, her nose is pert, like a delicate antenna, the bangs she seems to have cut herself fall artlessly over a broad forehead, and there are the faint remnants of pimples on her full cheeks.
She was fourteen then, and it was the most beautiful moment in her twenty-one years on this planet. Then, suddenly, that moment vanished. That’s all I know. I have no way of understanding why, or what possible purpose it may have served. No one does.
*
She said, in all seriousness—no joke—that she had come to college in order to receive a divine revelation. She told me this a little before four in the morning, when we were lying naked in bed. I asked her what a divine revelation was like.
“How the heck would I know,” she said. A minute later she added, “But whatever it is, it flies down from heaven like a pair of angel wings.”
<
br /> I imagined a pair of angel wings descending on the central square of our school. Viewed from a distance, they looked like tissue paper.
*
No one knows why she chose to die. I doubt somehow that she did either.
27
I had an unpleasant dream. I was a big black bird flying westward over a thick jungle. I was badly wounded, my feathers caked with black blood. Ominous dark clouds were gathering in the western sky, and there was a whiff of rain in the air.
I hadn’t dreamed for a long time. So long, in fact, that it took a while to realize what had just happened.
I got out of bed, showered off the nasty sweat, and had a breakfast of toast and apple juice. Beer and cigarettes had left my throat feeling stuffed with old cotton. I chucked the dirty dishes into the sink and selected an olive-green cotton suit, the most neatly pressed shirt I could find, and a black knit tie. I carried them out to the front room and sat down beside the air conditioner.
The TV news was predicting, in triumphant tones, that this might be the hottest day of the summer. I switched off the set and went into my older brother’s room next door, chose a few books from the massive pile, took them to the front room, and stretched out on the couch.
Two years earlier, my brother had taken off for America without a word of explanation, leaving behind a roomful of books and a girlfriend. She and I still got together for a meal every so often. According to her, my brother and I were very similar. This came as something of a shock.
“Like where exactly?” I asked.
“Like everywhere,” she said.
Maybe she was right. After all, we’d been taking turns shining the same shoes for more than ten years.
—
When twelve o’clock rolled around, I fastened my tie, put on my jacket, and headed out the door, already fed up with the heat awaiting me.
I had time to kill, so I decided to cruise around. Our town occupied a pitifully long and narrow strip running from the ocean up to the foot of the mountains. It never changed: a river and a tennis court, a golf course, a lengthy row of large houses, walls upon walls, a handful of tidy restaurants and boutiques, an old library, fields filled with evening primrose, a park with a monkey cage.
The Wind (1) and Up Bird Chronicle (2) Page 6
